THE Korea Times reported this week that Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon faced growing calls from labor activists to scrap the South Korean capital's Filipino nanny program, one of the key policies he introduced to help alleviate the East Asian country's fertility crisis.

The ostensible reason for the controversy sounds almost trivial to Filipinos accustomed to dealing with the vagaries of household help — two of the 100 Filipino domestic workers went AWOL during a long holiday in August. But what might pass for an everyday occurrence in Manila has apparently been deemed worthy of headlines in South Korea.